Durkheim’s theory of social solidarity and social rules

Abstract

It is obvious and generally accepted that, in one form or another, social solidarity was always the focus of Durkheim’s attention. In fact, for him, it serves as a synonym for the normal state of society, while absence of it is a deviation from that normal state, or social pathology. The theme of solidarity permeates all his work. His first course of lectures at the University of Bordeaux, read in the years 1887-1888, was not by chance called “Social Solidarity,"1 while his doctoral thesis (1893) was devoted to the demonstration of the basic role of the division of labor in building, maintaining, and reinforcing social solidarity (Durkheim [1984] 1997). It is true that Durkheim gradually moved away from the word “solidarity," probably due to its massive use outside social science and the thinker’s unwillingness to become a victim of the idols of the marketplace or those of the theatre. Moreover, the word is hardly ever used in the scientific texts of the members of his school. His faithful disciple and nephew Marcel Mauss in his two well-known texts of 1931 and 1934, “Social Cohesion in Polysegmentary Societies” (Mauss 1969a) and “Fragment of a Plan of General Descriptive Sociology” (Mauss 1969b), prefers to speak of “social cohesion” and not of “solidarity," only briefly mentioning the two Durkheimian types of the latter in the second of these texts.2 Nevertheless, until the end of his life, even when Durkheim did not actually use the word “solidarity," he anyway researched and tried to substantiate the phenomenon in question.